


Seeing Stars

by radioactivesaltghoul



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Reylo - Freeform, Star Wars Day, in which i yet again headcanon ben solo as being good at dancing, leia ships reylo pass it on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 02:29:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14534715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radioactivesaltghoul/pseuds/radioactivesaltghoul
Summary: Rey and Ben know that it’s a terrible idea to sneak out and go incognito at a festival on an unfamiliar planet, but they do it anyway because they’re weak.Aka: shameless reylo fluff in celebration of Star Wars Day.





	Seeing Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Star Wars Day! Have some shameless reylo fluff to celebrate.
> 
> The Festival of the Stars is a totally made-up thing, but Akiva is not.
> 
> This is simultaneously canon-compliant while also being something that is too fluffy to ever happen anywhere in the SW canon.

Rey knew that sneaking out to meet Ben Solo on an unfamiliar planet was a terrible idea for three reasons.

  1. She was lying to her friends about where she was going and who she was meeting.
  2. She was lying to her boss--his _mother_ \--about where she was going and who she was meeting.
  3. She was lying to herself about why she was meeting him.



It wasn’t a diplomatic thing. It wasn’t an assassination attempt on the Supreme Leader of the First Order. It was because she missed him so kriffing much, and she wanted a night off from her job as the Resistance’s resident Force expert-slash-the last Jedi.

It was an unspoken thing between her and Ben that they were both capable of starting and severing a Force bond session, but neither of them was really trying to stay away. They didn’t interact much. It was more like they caught glimpses of each other. Like while she was eating dinner, laughing with her friends. Or while he was in a meeting, trying (and failing) to look like he wasn’t considering murdering everyone sitting at the table with him. Once, she swore she felt him kiss her cheek while she was half-asleep. 

So yeah. She was sneaking out to meet Kylo Ren-slash-Ben Solo on an unfamiliar planet, and when she’d asked why she should do such a thing (even though she knew she was going to agree anyway), all he’d said was “trust me.” And somehow, she found that she did trust him, even after everything that had happened on the _Supremacy_ and then on Crait.

It was stupid, but then again, love made Rey stupid.

She thought about taking the Falcon, but she dismissed that idea almost as soon as she came up with it for three reasons:

  1. It was too recognizable
  2. It was missed too easily
  3. It was probably a really bad idea to show up in a reminder of Ben’s family issues when they were both trying so hard to pretend that they didn’t have an entire galaxy’s worth of things in their way.



Besides, she figured she could probably just ask someone to borrow a ship. The Resistance had found sanctuary on an old Rebel base that had a few ancient but salvageable ships on it. Between Rey and Rose, they’d managed to get enough of them up and running that the few remaining members of the Resistance felt like they had a little room to breathe. And thanks to the fact that all things Force-related were a mystery to pretty much everyone in the Resistance (including, unfortunately, Rey herself), nobody would question her if she said she needed to borrow a ship for a few days to go “do a Force thing." 

(Technically, it wasn’t a lie. It _was_ something that had to do with her Force connection with Ben. It was just not the kind of “Force thing” that her friends would expect from her.)

She’d even managed to avoid discussing it in depth with Leia. One of the other higher-ups had okayed Rey’s request, which meant that she didn’t even have to ask her about it. Rey didn’t trust herself to lie convincingly to Leia Organa, especially about something involving her son. In fact, she thought that she was going to completely avoid having any sort of conversation about it with Leia until she walked onto the ship to prepare to leave and spotted Leia sitting in the cockpit.

“G-general Organa,” Rey said, trying to avoid letting her panic show on her face. “I got permission to take a few days to go do a Force thing. I can show you the documents granting me approval if you lie.”

“By go do a ‘Force thing,’ do you mean my son?” Leia asked, giving Rey a severe look.

_Kriff._ Rey was screwed. She felt her face heat up as her brain scrambled for an explanation, but a second later, Leia’s face cracked into a grin.

“You forget, the Force runs strong in me as well,” Leia said, gesturing to Rey to sit. “I may not have trained in it, but I’m still a Skywalker.”

“I’m sorry,” Rey said, unable to make eye contact with Leia. “I didn’t mean to lie to you. It’s just…” She trailed off, unsure of how to explain.

“It’s complicated,” said Leia. “I know.”

“I’m not leaving the Resistance,” Rey said. “And I won’t go to the dark side. He knows that.”

Leia didn’t say anything for a moment. Rey was about to open her mouth to ask if she was going to stop her from going when Leia said, “I don’t forgive my son for what he’s done. I may never forgive him. But…” She sighed. “We made a lot of mistakes with him. Me, Han, and Luke. I don’t want to believe that he’s completely gone. But you can’t save him. You know that, right?”

Rey nodded. “I thought I could, before,” she said. “But only he can save himself.”

“So why are you sneaking off to meet him?” Leia said with a knowing grin.

Rey felt her face heat up again, and Leia laughed as she stood up to leave. “I expect you back in no longer than a week,” she said. “Oh, and Rey?” she said as she paused at the door. “Please give me a granddaughter.”

“General,” Rey gasped. “That is _not_ what I--” But Leia just laughed as she walked down the ramp off of the ship.

 

* * *

 

Ben knew that it was a bad idea to ask Rey to meet him on Akiva for their Festival of the Stars festival for three reasons.

  1. There was a chance he could be recognized as the Supreme Leader of the First Order, even with the half-mask that was customary to Akiva’s Festival of the Stars celebration.
  2. There was a chance that someone in the First Order would track him there, even though he’d disabled every single tracking device embedded in the incognito ship he was borrowing to attend said festival.
  3. There was a chance that he had completely misjudged Rey’s reasons for agreeing to meet him on Akiva because he was so desperate to see her again.



Even though he was pretty sure that he and Rey were on the same page with their (non) relationship, judging by the fact that she said she trusted him (which had surprised him, if he was being honest), he had a hard time trusting anyone these days. Funny what a lifetime of abuse and manipulation got you. But despite all of his instincts screaming at him to stop trusting the woman who had turned down his proposal to rule the galaxy together, he couldn’t help but try to find a way to see her again.

He had only attended the Festival of the Stars once when he was a child, trailing along after his parents. But it was one of his happier memories of childhood, and considering the fact that Rey completely lacked any sort of happy childhood memories (as far as he had seen), he wanted to do something to make up for lost time.

It was stupid, but then again, love made Ben stupid.

He touched down on Akiva just outside of the capital city where the celebrations were going to be the biggest, glad that he’d come in a small ship. Parking was tight. He and Rey had been half-connected for the entire journey there, unable to resist silently checking in with each other as they drew nearer and nearer. He knew that it was possible for her to figure out where the First Order flagship was living these days, which meant that it was possible for the Resistance to know where they were, but he trusted her enough to let that happen. Besides, he was halfway to not giving a shit if the First Order burned down completely while he was gone, so long as he wasn’t on the flagship when it happened. (He was mildly concerned with the power vacuum it would create, but only mildly.)

Festivities were well underway by the time that he and Rey met up in Myrra. If it weren’t for the way her Force signature was unmistakable to him, he wouldn’t have recognized her without her customary three-bun hairstyle. Neither one of them said anything as they locked eyes. The sounds and the crowds around Ben faded away as he struggled to figure out what to say to Rey. It was the first time they’d seen each other outside of the Force bond since the fight on the Supremacy two months ago. He didn’t know whether to be grateful or not that he wasn’t the only one at a loss for words.

Rey was the one to break the silence first. “Nice mask,” she said with a small smirk. Ben barked out a laugh, and the sounds of the festival around him started up again. “I doubt anyone would expect to see you in something so elegant.”

“You seem surprised,” he said as he stepped closer to her. His mask was a mess of swirling black lace patterns that trailed diagonally across his face, mostly covering up his scar. (Not that he was ashamed of having been bested in combat by Rey, but it was a rather recognizable mark.) Hers looked like it was made from scrap metal that had been welded together by someone who didn’t have proper equipment for welding, which probably meant that she’d made it herself.

Force, he had missed her. Was it okay if he reached out to touch her?

Before he could figure that out, she stepped closer and traced her fingers along the lacy edges of his mask. His breath hitched as he felt her touch his cheek before quickly pulling her hand back as if she’d remembered who he was and what they were doing. “So why did you ask me to meet you here?” she said as she gestured to the festival around her.

“I’m going to guess that you’ve never attended the Festival of the Stars,” he said.

“Not a whole lot to celebrate on Jakku,” she said. “What is it?”

“On the longest night of the year in Myrra, people celebrate the Festival of the Stars. There are lights and parties and all of the normal things you expect from celebrations, but an hour before dawn, every light in the city goes out. Akivans believe that that’s when the dead journey from one world to the next, following the path that the stars make when they align tonight.”

“So we’re celebrating a giant funeral?” She sounded skeptical. Ben guessed that she was frowning beneath her mask.

“It’s a celebration of life,” he said. “Akivans believe that people get trapped between this world and the next if they die with regrets. The living celebrate the Festival of the Stars because it’s a day to do the things that you know you’ll regret if you die before you finish them. The dead celebrate because it’s the one night they can cross into the next world if they got stuck here after they died.”

“What are we doing here, Ben?” she asked softly.

He’d had some time to think about this on the journey from the First Order flagship, and he’d come up with three reasons:

  1. He wanted to show Rey that the galaxy contained something other than starvation, scavenging, or war.
  2. He wanted to take a night off from the bantha-shit that running the First Order entailed. He was a Force-user, not a politician.
  3. He wanted to make good on the Akivan’s ritual and do something that he’d regret not doing if he died.



Ben didn’t want to tell Rey any of those reasons. “We’re here to celebrate,” he said simply. “Come on. Let’s go get something to eat. They have these really great cookies they make in the shape of stars.”

 

* * *

 

The most anyone on Jakku ever celebrated was when they found something that brought in an especially big price at Niima Outpost. If Rey had traded BB-8 to Plutt way back then, she would have been the host of a one-person celebration in her AT-AT. But she didn’t, and even though she was now directly involved in a galactic war, she did not regret that decision at all. Now that she was thinking about it, Rey didn’t really have any regrets.

She was afraid to ask Ben what he regretted. She didn’t want to know the answer.

“How do you know about this?” she asked as Ben handed her a star-shaped cookie.

“I came here once to celebrate it when I was a kid,” he said.

“Just once?”

“It’s one of the few happy memories I have from my childhood,” he mumbled. “My parents had to make an appearance at the celebration. Some political thing. I forget exactly what.”

Rey felt her face heat up at the memory of Leia asking for a granddaughter. Ben must have sensed something, because he said, “What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” Rey said quickly. “Not important.” He looked like he was about to ask another question, so she cut him off. “What do they do to celebrate other than eat, turn off lights, and do things they’ll regret not doing?”

“Oh, you know, typical festival stuff.”

“You say that like I’ve ever been to a festival,” Rey said, the words coming out sharper than she intended.

“Right, sorry,” Ben said. It was so unlike him to apologize that she blinked, unsure of how to react. Should she have recorded him apologizing? Or was that petty thing to do? “People drink,” he said. “Akivan champagne is quite popular. And there’s a lot of singing, but I don’t know any of the traditional songs.”

“I’m not drinking anything,” she said.

He cringed. “I didn’t mean--It’s just something that’s popular. We don’t have to do it.” There was a bit of an awkward silence before he said hesitantly, “Dancing is also popular.”

The idea of dancing with Ben made her heart pound. Standing close, moving in tandem, and grabbing each other was fine in the heat of battle. But here, at the Festival of the Stars? “I don’t know how to dance,” she said.

“Come on,” he said, offering her his hand. “I’ll teach you.” Rey took his hand and smiled. This was an offer she could accept.

He led her onto the dance floor where a band was playing a lively tune, then he turned to face her. “Put your left hand on my shoulder,” he said. “And--is this okay?” he asked as he placed his hand under hers, his fingers resting lightly on her shoulder blade. She nodded, and he touched her more firmly. Rey had the stupid thought that she wanted him to hold her closer, but she didn’t say anything as he held her right hand in his and explained how to move her feet. She was surprised by how easily she picked up the steps. She wondered if it was another weird Force bond thing.

Before she knew it, he was swinging her around, twirling to the beat of the music. And even though her heart was beating fast, she felt oddly at ease. While they were dancing like this, it was easy to pretend that they were two normal people out to celebrate a normal festival and before she knew it, Ben was pulling her aside to pause. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve been dancing for hours. Let’s take a break.”

Even though Rey had been hesitant to join the dancing, she found that she was a little reluctant to leave as Ben pulled away. Before he could drop her hand completely, she twined her fingers through his. She had a moment where she was afraid of losing him in the crowd before remembering that there was no way she could ever lose him, not while they were bonded in the Force.

They came to a building that was built into a hill with a massive, empty balcony facing the city. Ben stopped, seemed to consider something, and then dropped Rey’s hand to climb over the railing.

“What are you doing?” Rey asked. “Should you be there?”

Ben looked down at her and shrugged. “No one’s here,” he said. “It’s probably fine. We can Jedi mind trick anyone into leaving us alone.” Rey bit her cheek to keep from laughing, and she followed him over the railing.

From the edge of the balcony, they had a view of the main city square that they had just been in. There were lights and candles lining the buildings, and they could see bright flashes of color from the masks and festive clothing that Akivans were wearing. They could still hear the faint sounds of the band as the musicians launched into another lively tune, and Rey found herself wishing they were still dancing.

“Okay,” she said as they looked out over the city. “You’ve got me. This is totally worth sneaking off to go do.”

“You’re just saying that because there’s free food.”

Rey couldn’t figure out if he was trying to tease her or not. “Well yeah, anything that involves free food is good,” she said. “But I like dancing.”

“I’m sure you have plenty of friends to dance with back where you’re living right now,” he said. He tried and failed to make the words sound casual. 

Rey was about to do something really stupid. But no regrets, right? That was the point of this celebration. “Let me rephrase that,” she said, stepping closer to him. “I like dancing with _you_.” With that, she placed her hands on his cheeks, and pulled him in for a kiss.

 

* * *

 

Ben had not asked Rey to meet him at the Festival of Stars for the purpose of kissing her, but he’d have been lying if he said that he would have regretted kissing her. 

However, when Rey’s lips met his, he froze because despite everything, he couldn’t believe that she was actually kissing him. She pulled away and turned bright red when she felt him freeze. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I--”

He cut her off with a kiss, now that he was mentally prepared for it. “I’m not,” he murmured when he pulled back.

“Oh good,” whispered Rey. “Then I take it back.” She kissed him again, wrapping her arms around his neck to pull him in closer. It felt completely natural to wrap his arms around her waist and hold her close. Like most things they did, it seemed to work better when they didn’t think too hard about what they were doing and just let their bodies do what felt right.

“Ben?” she murmured against his lips.

“Mm?” He pulled away to look at her.

“No regrets, right?”

“No regrets,” he repeated, wondering why she was asking.

“In that case…” She pulled him backwards away from the edge of the balcony. “Let’s get out of here.”

The war and political bantha-shit could wait until tomorrow. Tonight was time to celebrate and do stupid things that he was going to regret not doing. “I’ll follow you wherever you want,” he told her. “Lead the way.”

 

* * *

 

Somewhere on the other side of the galaxy sat a princess-turned-senator-turned-general. “I know my son has done a lot of wrong things,” she said to no one in particular. “But for once, let him do something right, and _give me a godsdamn granddaughter_.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> This was partially inspired by [this tumblr post](http://acagoldsmith.tumblr.com/post/173014564371/the-scion-a-meta-on-ben-solos-royal-status-or) about Leia wanting a granddaughter.
> 
> Thank you for reading! If you liked it, please share it with a friend or two! And I would love to hear what you think, either here or on [tumblr](https://radioactivesaltghoul.tumblr.com/).


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